An intriguing but preachy financial tale.
In this novel, a successful investment broker stumbles on his boss’s illegal scheme and gets drawn into a lurid world of nihilistic avarice.
Charles Collier has worked at Priority Investments for 16 years and suddenly lands the biggest account of his career: the Kaiser Foundation, an organization that has garnered “world renowned success,” run by Adolph Kaiser. Charles’ boss, William Fossett, the CEO of the firm, assigns him a new hire, Dennis Reading, to assist with the deal. But Charles starts to suspect something about the account is terribly awry. While reading a classified internal report, he notices a massive charge to Kaiser—$1.3 million—listed nebulously as an “imposed custom expense,” something that he’s never heard of. Eventually, Charles realizes just how crooked William is—he’s in cahoots with Dennis, embezzling millions from clients. When William suspects Charles is onto him, he is willing to have the broker killed. Apparently, there are rumors William murdered a former partner. When William suddenly turns up dead and Dennis disappears, Charles is faced with a moral dilemma. Does he expose the crime or take the embezzled millions for himself, an illicit strategy pushed by his chronically unfaithful wife, Emily? Kazlausky’s timely tale is as ambitious as it is complex—he means to tell a kind of parable, exposing the underbelly of greed through a tangled web of murder, conspiratorial plots, and double-crossings. But the slow-paced story eventually becomes didactic and sermonizing—the author never tires of reminding readers of his important moral lesson. Dennis clearly delineates this while considering a betrayal of William with the CEO’s sister, Helen: “The thought of money, escaping to another country, spending his life with Helen, it all spelled out...greed.” While the prose is clear, it is often featureless—there are few literary embellishments in the intricate narrative.
An intriguing but preachy financial tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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